Solzhenitsyn's short novel described a single day in the life of a
carpenter caught up in the Soviet Union's secret network of slave labor
camps, where starvation, bitter cold and punishing work regimes were the
rule and, it has been said, the average life expectancy was one winter.
The author was working as a provincial math teacher, and his greatest
work, "The Gulag Archipelago," was still to come. But "One Day" was to
shock the USSR and the world.
Some of the crimes of the dictator Josef Stalin were exposed and
denounced following a secret speech by Communist Party leader Nikita
Khrushchev in 1956, as part of his short-lived campaign to reform the
brutal Soviet system.
But Solzhenitsyn's novel, based on the seven years he spent as a
prisoner, was the first real expose of the gulag — a word derived from
the Russian "Glavnoe Upravelenie Lagerei," or Main Camp Administration.
Solzhenitsyn, who went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature but
was exiled from his homeland because of his work, died of heart failure
yesterday at age 89, his son Stepan Solzhenitsyn told The Associated
Press.
The gulag was, Solzhenitsyn wrote, the "human meat grinder" for
processing what Stalin sneered at as "wreckers," vermin and "enemies of
the people" who allegedly sabotaged Soviet progress to the workers'
paradise. The grim process started, typically, with a knock on the door
late at night, an arrest on charges of trivial or imaginary crimes,
condemnation by a secret tribunal, transportation by unheated rail car
and finally incarceration in the camps.
The prisoners formed a secret army of slave laborers who built
railroads, worked in mines and cleared forests in some of the world's
most inhospitable terrain. In the end, by the most authoritative
estimate, the gulag systematically ground down some 29 million souls.
Armed with his literary talent and prodigious memory, Solzhenitsyn
spent more than 40 years working in secrecy, in fear and finally in
exile as he chiseled away at the lies that supported the Soviet system.
And in the end he, as much perhaps as any individual, helped to bring it
down.
'One Day' was the critical beginning of this work.
"If the Soviet Union's elite were to accept that the portrait of Ivan
Denisovich was authentic, that meant admitting that innocent people had
endured pointless suffering," wrote Anne Applebaum in her book, 'Gulag:
A History'. "If the camps had really been stupid and wasteful and
tragic, that meant that the Soviet Union was stupid and wasteful and
tragic too."
After the book appeared, readers of Novyi Mir responded with an
outpouring of letters describing their anguish and grief. "Now I read
and weep, but when I was imprisoned in Ukhta for ten years I did not
shed a tear," one reader said in letter to the magazine.
Solzhenitsyn's novel would never have been published if Khrushchev
hadn't hoped it would undermine support in the Kremlin for neo-Stalinist
policies. But perhaps in part because of the novel's publication,
Khrushchev was ousted by Communist Party leaders in 1964. The gulag,
meanwhile, continued to incarcerate enemies of the people until two
years before the Soviet collapse.
When Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize in 1970, Soviet authorities
refused to let him go to Stockholm to accept the award. In the text of
the speech he could not deliver to the Swedish Academy, smuggled out of
the USSR, Solzhenitsyn recalled an old Russian proverb: "One word of
truth shall outweigh the whole world."
But Solzhenitsyn was not a storybook hero for his admirers in Europe
and the United States. Many, especially in the West, found his political
judgments as distressing as his literature was inspiring.
After he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and expelled from the
USSR in 1974, he settled in bucolic Cavendish, Vermont. There, he
became frustrated with what he regarded as the West's shallow obsession
with individualism and liberty — which, in his view, had degenerated
into narcissism and license. Democracy had brought paralysis, he
believed, affluence decadence.
In a 1978 speech at Harvard University, Solzhenitsyn — who with his
beard and dour demeanor resembled a figure from an Orthodox icon —
denounced the Western view that liberal democracy was fated to triumph
in non-Western civilizations, which he called "worlds" unto themselves.
"There is this belief that all those other worlds are only being
temporarily prevented by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by
their own barbarity or incomprehension from taking the way of Western
pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life,"
Solzhenitsyn said.
"It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these worlds
are not at all developing into similarity; neither one can be
transformed into the other without the use of violence."
After his return to Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn was outraged by what
he found — a Kremlin, in his view, unable to stop the looting of
Russia's vast resources by politically connected tycoons and unwilling
to stand up against what he saw as the encroaching threat of NATO and
other Western institutions.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the Communist reformer, restored Solzhenitsyn's
Soviet citizenship in 1990 and dropped treason charges against him.
President Boris Yeltsin, who dismantled the Soviet system, tried to woo
the author.
Solzhenitsyn blamed Gorbachev and Yeltsin for Russia's economic
crisis, its military weakness and what he regarded as subservience to
the West.
When Yeltsin awarded Solzhenitsyn Russia's highest honor, the Order
of St Andrew, in 1998 the writer refused to accept it. When Yeltsin left
office in 2000, Solzhenitsyn wanted him prosecuted.
"I feel that Yeltsin permitted an enormous devastation of Russia," Solzhenitsyn told the New Yorker's David Remnick in 2001.
In the 1990s, Solzhenitsyn's views were regarded by Moscow's
political elites and some disillusioned Western supporters as
old-fashioned, out of step with Russia's march toward integration with
the West. In time, however, Solzhenitsyn's views would be echoed in the
halls of the Kremlin.
The author at first seemed wary of President Vladimir Putin, a former
KGB officer. But he gradually warmed to Putin, as the Russian president
reigned in the oligarchs, reclaimed state control of some of Russia's
natural resources and adopted a more assertive — at times
confrontational — relationship with the United States and the West.
Solzhenitsyn, meanwhile, did not quarrel with the Kremlin's drive to
eliminate voices of dissent from the media, marginalize the political
opposition and restore its role as the unchallenged center of Russian
power.
Russian liberals are careful to draw the distinction between
Solzhenitsyn the writer and Solzhenitsyn the political figure. They
cherish the former, and are reluctant to criticize the latter.
"He wrote the 'Gulag Archipelago'," Andre Mironov, who was sentenced
to a term in a prison camp in the 1980s for possession of unauthorized
books, told The Associated Press. "This was above all."
Some Western critics, meanwhile, have been harsher, accusing
Solzhenitsyn of becoming an apologist for Putin's authoritarian rule.
Last year, after three years in relative obscurity, Solzhenitsyn
granted a rare interview to the liberal weekly Moscow News, in which he
warned that Russia risked a Ukrainian-style revolt because of Western
interference. He also accused the United States of the "occupation" of
Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Putin's assertive foreign policy, he was quoted as saying, was
"forward thinking," while blaming the Russian president's predecessors
for the gulf separating Russia's ultra-wealthy elites and its millions
of poor.
On June 12, during the Day of Russia holiday celebrations in the
Kremlin, Putin presented Solzhenitsyn with a state prize for his
"humanitarian" contribution to the nation. The author, apparently too
frail to attend, was represented by his wife, Natalya.
"Millions of people associate the name and work of Alexander
Solzhenitsyn with Russia's fate," Putin said at the ceremony. "His
academic research, outstanding literary work and, in fact, his entire
life have been dedicated to the Fatherland."
In a taped message, Solzhenitsyn said he hoped Russians' experience
during the "cruel and troubled years" of the Soviet era would help avert
more suffering. "It will forewarn and protect us from destructive
breakdowns," he said, looking pale and thin in a gray suit and tie.
Solzhenitsyn had become, once again, a symbol of Russia: a nation
caught between its tragic past and its uncertain future; between its
faith in state power and its fear of new repression.
His journey was, after all, Russia's bitter journey through the 20th
century. And if the West sometimes had a hard time understanding
Solzhenitsyn and his country, well, perhaps that's because of Russia's
singular history.
"How can you expect a man who is warm to understand a man who is cold?" he wrote in 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch.'
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